A fraudster who was part of a scheme targeting London Underground passengers in a text message scam laundered £600,000 through gift cards, a court has heard.
Four defendants were sentenced on Tuesday over the plot where text messages were sent out using homemade “SMS blasters” hidden inside suitcases that were wheeled around the Underground network.
Travellers who walked past the devices received fake messages about a failed parcel delivery and a link inviting them to input their details to sort the problem, but the aim was really to “plunder their bank accounts”, Inner London Crown Court was told.
The court heard that although it was difficult to quantify how much money the fraudsters had gained specifically from the texting scheme, “top boss” Zhijia Fan, 48, had personally benefited more than £100,000.
Prosecutor Alex Davidson said Fan’s co-defendants Daoyan Shang, 20; Wan Hafiz, 41; and Gatis Lauks, 25, were thought to have received less than this amount, but Lauks had laundered around £600,000 through the purchasing of gift cards using stolen bank details.
Lauks was paid 5% commission for the gift cards he loaded and believed he personally made about £30,000 from the scheme, the hearing was told.
The court heard that after giving a “no comment” interview to police in May 2025, Lauks returned five days later and confessed to his role in the fraud.
The 25-year-old revealed he had been recruited in June or July 2024 to purchase gift cards using stolen bank account details and Fan became “his handler”, Mr Davidson said.
Lauks explained a “lady in China” was able to provide him with “real-time remote technical support” and he would use an app on his phone loaded with stolen bank details to make in-store purchases, the prosecutor added.
The defendant said he could purchase 100 gift cards per day and, on one occasion, had bought £8,000 worth of gift cards from a UK store, the court heard.
The group used the gift cards to purchase items including clothes, Pokemon cards, Louis Vuitton goods and video games, Mr Davidson said.
Fan, of Winchester Street in Acton, had asked Lauks to wheel around an SMS blaster in a suitcase but this did not go ahead because of issues with the device’s battery, the court heard.
Lauks was also sent to France to assess the “feasibility” of conducting the scam on the Paris Metro, but this idea was rejected as the country “did not have the same vulnerabilities as could be exploited by the crime group in England”, the prosecutor added.
Police said an investigation was launched on March 11 2025 when an off-duty British Transport Police (BTP) detective spotted a man with a suitcase containing holes and emitting a green flash sitting at a platform at King’s Cross Underground station.
Officers searching Fan, Shang and Hafiz’s London addresses seized 10,832 gift cards loaded with more than £80,000 in profits generated from fraud, BTP said.
Shang and Fan had previously been on trial at Inner London Crown Court and both changed their pleas to guilty on a charge of conspiracy to defraud between January and March 2025.
On Tuesday, both defendants were jailed, with Fan sentenced to four years and eight months and Shang, of Caxton Road, Shepherd’s Bush, to two years and 10 months.
At the same hearing, Hafiz, of Queensway in Paddington, was jailed for 14 months for conspiracy to defraud and 10 weeks for possession of articles for use in fraud, with both sentences to run concurrently.
Recorder Alex Stein told Hafiz he would also be subject to deportation proceedings as he is not a British national.
Lauks, of Ealing, west London, previously pleaded guilty to a charge of fraud by false representation and was sentenced to two years, suspended for two years.
Sentencing the four men, the judge said the scheme was an “extremely sophisticated fraud” in which all of the defendants had been “knowing participants”.
He said “tens of thousands” of smishing messages had been sent and although not all of these been responded to, “each one represents either an attempted offence or a completed offence”.
Another suspect, Jinhua Zhang, 58, is on the run, having fled when he was released on bail, the court heard.
Speaking after the sentencing, Detective Inspector Tim Weekes of the BTP said: “These organised scammers concealed SMS blasters in suitcases in a bid to plunder the bank accounts of unsuspecting commuters.
“Their plot to defraud passengers was foiled by one of our vigilant detectives, who was off duty when he spotted the device at a London Tube station.
“An extensive investigation followed, drawing on specialists from across BTP and we built a case so robust the gang had no choice but to plead guilty.
“These convictions were achieved thanks to the close work our detectives undertook with mobile network operators, including BT, Virgin Media, O2, and Vodafone-Three, Sky, as well as the National Cyber Security Centre and Ofcom.”
